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💃 Introducing Salesforce COFO Robin Washington 🕺

💃 Introducing Salesforce COFO Robin Washington 🕺

A longtime board director two-fers the C-Suite

Salesforce ChaCha
February 13, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! A COFO is the Chief Operating and Financial Officer.

That’s like flying a plane and racing a car at the same time.

Would a $300,000,000,000 company like Salesforce consider replacing their CFO and COO with this mega COFO role?

Yes! They would. They are. It’s happening 👇

CONTEXT

Salesforce Chief Operating and Financial Officer

Let’s do a quick recap-

Current Salesforce Chief Operating Officer Brian Millham is exiting Salesforce on May 1, 2025.

Current Salesforce Chief Financial Officer Amy Weaver is departing Salesforce after her role has been backfilled.

Marc must have a special calculator because…

1 + 1 = 1

To replace two high-achieving executives, Salesforce is bringing in ONE. BIG. GUN.

That big gun is Robin Washington, who will step into a combined role of COFO - Chief Operating and Financial Officer.

As an akimbo chief, she will have oversight of Salesforce’s operational and financial strategy and execution, including the development of Agentforce.

WHO IS SHE?

Salesforce in Her Veins

Robin is no stranger to Salesforce, tech, or being a badass.

She’s been on the Salesforce board since 2013, during which Salesforce’s market cap has 8x’d 🚀🚀.

Her career began during the original tech boom in the 90’s, and when the tech bubble burst in the 2000’s, she glided above the fray as an exec at PeopleSoft.

Then, she went on to hold CFO roles at Hyperion and Gilead Sciences.

She made her way to Salesforce’s board, as well as the boards for Honeywell, Alphabet (Google), Tektronix, MIPS Technologies, and StockX 😳.

She has been CFO and on boards for some heavy hitters. From her track record, she seems to be a good fit anywhere, including as the COFO for Salesforce 🙌.

WHY HER?

Questions…and Possible Answers…

Why Robin, why now?

Valid question, since she’s been on the board for 13yrs, why bring her down now?

Well, with the current COO and CFO already announcing their exit plans, it’s hard enough to backfill one c-suite role in a $300BB company - backfilling two at the same time comes with enormous risk.

It would take any new hire a year or two to fully ramp into their role. With Robin, the hope may be that it’s faster, and for TWO roles. She may not have been near the frontlines, but 13 years on the board- she knows the patterns 🧠.

Why would Robin take this role?

As an uber-accomplished leader, why come down from the board to muck it up with the W-2 workers?

Ego? Prove that she can do it? Nah…

Stakes, rather. She undoubtedly has a nice chunk of equity in Salesforce, accumulated during her 13 years on the board of directors. She sees the potential disaster of losing two of the most important people in the 70,000 person company, and she’s stepping up to the plate to minimize the damage 🙏.

If she’s this amazing, is this the succession plan the street has been waiting for?

Doubtful. She is 61 years old, one year older than Marc. She isn’t doing this to become the next CEO of Salesforce. When you’re on 5 boards, your grind days are behind you.

She is an over-qualified placeholder until Marc and Salesforce develop internal young guns or pay big dollars to bring in outside talent.

What can go wrong?

Let’s start with what has gone wrong -

Salesforce is struggling to retain their executive talent, and is either churning or unable to develop their younger execs into c-level stars. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have all been successful in backfilling their leadership roles internally.

This is quite shocking because Salesforce continues to grow, despite being unable to retain top talent 🤷🏻.

But what can go wrong with bringing a board member to fill TWO c-suite roles? Here’s 3 things-

👎 They’re losing a valuable perspective on the board. Yes, they’re gaining a valuable executive, but the purpose of the board is to provide top-down strategy to the company.

👎 How will this be perceived by the current stock of ambitious SVPs who weren’t good enough to be placed in the role? It is not building a culture that if you stick around and work hard, there’s a seat for you at the highest levels.

👎 Potential for groupthink. There are now 3 board members who are also in the c-suite - Marc, Parker Harris, and now Robin Washington. A diverse board brings diverse perspectives. When half your board is working within the company, they may lose some of that creativity.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Robin Washington is one of a handful of people that can walk into Salesforce and successfully backfill two legends - Amy Weaver and Brian Millham.

But it’s clearly a stop-gap play, with her age and having not been a FTE for a decade.

Marc is digging deep into his bag of tricks to keep Salesforce growth rising 📈. But he’s eventually gonna reach down into that bag and find there’s nothing left to pull out.

He’s done a lot right. It might be time to put a heavier focus on succession planning, and identifying talent that can, within the next 5 or so years, take over for Marc.

SOUL FOOD